Release the Hounds
A story where Godwyn and Thomas evade capture from Norman huntsmen, Hywl and Randolph recover the Bishop of Salisbury's ward - the brash bastard son of some duke, and then together at the Lady of the Woods bequest volunteer to rescue her Lord who was wrongly imprisoned by wizards long ago.
Date
1195, late Summer.
Player Characters
Non-Player Characters
- Lady of the Woods
- The Hunt
- Mericas
- Bishop of Salisbury
- Some Normans
Synopsis
The story started out with Thomas finding a purse in the forest. It seemed empty but was heavier than usual: coins were sewn into the lining. Godwyn removed the coins and added them to his hoard of cash and considered burning the purse (lest someone come hunting for it) but decided to wait.
Sooner or later a group of Normans came into the wood. Thomas and Godwyn hid because they thought they'd be punished as poachers under the harsh Norman forest laws. It turns out the Normans were looking for a lost, high-born boy.
Randolph had heard of the reward offered for the boy so he and Hywel Mawr set out to search as well. They wanted the money to improve the covenant buildings.
Godwyn decided to help Hywel find the lost boy. With the help of Randoplh's faerie hound, they tracked him to Mericas's hut, where the hedge wizard had been keeping the boy bound with ropes as a captive. Mericas gave an unconvincing story about finding the lost boy and keeping him for his own protection or some such nonsense. With a few words of lecture about what "interfering with mundanes" means, the two magi released the boy and dragged him off from under his captor's nose. Mericas was probably furious but there wasn't much he could do about it.
The magi had their grogs turn the boy over to Bishop of Salisbury, from whom he'd run away. This yielded a modest reward and, of course, a hard time from the bishop's penny-pinching purse-bearer. He only wanted to give Hywel half the reward because the boy had been found without the purse he had stolen.
Hywel and Godwyn went back to Godwyn's place to discuss whether to return the purse or not, when they were interrupted by an unexpected visit from the faerie Lady of the Forest. She entreated Hywel to help her release her consort from captivity. Without asking too many questions or really thinking, the magi agreed. They and their grogs found themselves whisked along a faerie trod to the mountains of southern Wales.
The magi had a couple of odd encounters along the way. An intelligent-seeming magpie harassed us a bit -- I think it tried to steal something -- and Hywel obliterated it with The Crystal Dart, a spell he has since renamed The Magpie's Demise. Hywel assured his companions that the magpie was a faerie and would come back from the dead, none the worse for wear.
The magi found the cave where the faerie captive was imprisoned. Its mouth looked artificial: it was a Roman mine tunnel. Around the entrance was a powerful ward that kept humans out. Godwyn assumed wolf form and was able to go right in and break the ward.
A faerie jester dressed in motely appeared and seemed angry at the magi, shouting something to the effect "now she'll never be mine!" He seemed intent on stopping the magi from entering the cave, and when they refused to listen cast some kind of spell on Randolph that shrunk him to the size of a cat. At that point Godwyn disarmed the faerie, using Spasms of the Uncontrolled Hand to make him drop his staff. A few more spells and some arrows from the miniature Randolph drove the faerie away.
Inside the cave mouth was an iron grate, which Godywn easily slipped through by using Supple Iron and Rigid Rope to bend the bars. This was when we found out the trapped faerie was none other than The Hunt. It was well known in the Tribunal that the magus Flumen of Blackthorn had trapped The Hunt in an iron mine some fifty or sixty years before. Now it was free again.
The Lord of the Hunt gave to Hywel a very old letter, addressed to Ozerk. It read:
the hunter is now the hunted beware the thorn of the black rose seek the light and return at dawn
True to the Lady's promise, the Mast of the Hunt has enchanted Godwyn's Woods so it now has the magical trait 'Foreboding Wood' and a person must make a personality check of 9 to enter it. It also has a Faerie Aura of 1 however this does not affect the magical aura around Godwyn's sanctum.